Have you ever walked past (or tripped over) a shared bike and wondered how it’s possible for the business to survive with a ride costing so little?

While bike-share schemes attract controversy in some places, the economic models behind such schemes actually have more to do with data mining, advertising and turning a profit from interest on the deposits than from the bike rental itself.

The most recent example in my own part of the world is Obikes. Launched in Australia in mid-June, there are currently over 1,250 dock-less Obikes in Melbourne and over 1,000 in Sydney. According to its marketing director, Obike’s Australian user numbers have increased rapidly since its introduction.

However, despite the promise of cheap and convenient access to bikes, Obikes have faced a number of challenges since their very first few weeks of operation. There have been complaints about Obikes clogging footpaths and becoming hazards as a result of people failing to park them within designated spaces, as well as complaints about Obikes hogging existing parking racks, leaving inadequate space for commuter cyclists to park their own bikes.

The massive potential for bike share schemes expansion

In theory, there are plenty of possible ways to make a profit from the shared-bike business. Its lucrative business models have proved attractive to entrepreneurs and investors.

The ride-and-pay model is the most straightforward profit-generating operation - but only one method of making the schemes profitable. For example, a half-hour ride of an Obike will cost the user A$1.99. If a bike is used for 10 half-hour trips per day, the total daily return will be A$19.9. A three-month operation could collect A$1,791. This will cover the initial investment made on the bikes, as well as some operational costs such as lost bikes and repairs - depending on the frequency of bike usage per day.

Bike-share schemes can also cash in on the deposits they require from users. The majority of schemes require users to register and pay a refundable security deposit to use the shared bikes (Obike asks for a deposit of A$69). Collectively, the amount of money held in the deposit pool is potentially enormous.

One Chinese bike-share company, Mobike, reportedly had over 100m registered users in June this year. The Mobike deposit account therefore held over 30bn yuan (about A$6bn) paid by the 100m users at 299 yuan per user. The interest earned from this sum alone is a huge income-generating asset, not to mention the scope to invest this money while it’s held in company coffers.

Data services present another significant potential income stream. The user database is huge – more than 100m trackable users in the case of Mobike. This can be used for marketing and the analysis of consumer behaviour if combined with other data sets.

Users’ riding behaviour data, captured by apps and GPS, complement very well the data sets collected from taxi and public transport systems by focusing on smaller areas. This data has a high commercial value to businesses in retail, restaurants and even car sales, as well as to local governments seeking more detailed information for urban planning and management applications.

Advertising is another means to generate profit by using both the physical body of the bikes to advertise as well as the app used to locate and unlock the bikes. However, the limited usable space on a bike and the short interaction time between the user and the app make it hard to generate significant income this way.

In Beijing and Shanghai, where dockless shared bikes were first introduced, bikes have been thrown into rivers, garbage dumps and even into trees. Pedestrians are forced to push their way through swathes of parked dockless shared bikes, often leaving behind a trail of fallen bikes or bikes stacked on top of one another on footpaths. The Hangzhou government has seized tens of thousands of shared bikes in an attempt to reinforce bike parking laws.

Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle has complained that Obikes are the source of so much clutter that he has threatened to ban them altogether.

In spite of these ongoing problems, bike-share schemes continue to grow into new markets globally, with new schemes in Florence and Milan the latest examples. At the same time, withdrawals from the market by less competitive or poorly executed models are occurring.

Local controversies over shared-bike schemes are expressions of how resident behaviour, municipal bylaws and cycling infrastructure are all too often proving to be unprepared to embrace and support a new mode of urban transport.

Public and local government criticisms and complaints may delay (or in extreme cases) even ban the bikes from particular cities. But as long as the interest for capital expansion and the broad social, environmental and health benefits are recognised, these schemes will continue to grow globally.

Speaking to the Conservative Party conference in September 2017, the UK prime minister, Theresa May, gave a stark assessment of the UK housing market which made for depressing listening for many young people: “For many the chance of getting onto the housing ladder has become a distant dream”, she said.

Now a new report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) provides further, clear evidence of this. The study finds that home ownership among 25 to 34-year-olds has declined sharply over the past 20 years. Home ownership rates have declined from 43 per cent at age 27 for someone born in the late 1970s, to just 25 per cent for someone aged 27 who was born in the late 1980s.

The most significant decline has been for middle-income young people, whose rate of home ownership has fallen from 65 per cent in 1995-6 to 27 per cent now – most significantly hitting aspirant buyers in London and the South-East.

Causes and consequences

The IFS study lays the blame for all this on the growing gap between house prices and incomes. Adjusting for inflation, house prices have risen 150 per cent in the 20 years to 2015-16, while real incomes for 25 to 34-year-olds have grown by 22 per cent (and almost all of that growth happened before the 2008 crash).

A bleak picture. Image: Institute for Fiscal Studies.

But, as the report acknowledges, the problem goes much deeper than this. Home ownership rates differ by region. Although there has been a decline in home ownership rates for young people across all areas of Great Britain, the decline is less significant in the North East and Cumbria as well as in Scotland and the South West. The biggest decline in ownership has been in the South-East, the North-West (excluding Cumbria) and London.

So a person aged 25 to 34 is more than twice as likely to own their own home in Cumbria, as their counterpart in London. Worse, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to own their own homes – even after controlling for differences in education and earnings. Home ownership continues to reflect a deeper inequality of opportunity in our society.

More houses needed

Part of the problem is that both Labour and Conservative governments have seen housing as a single, stand-alone market and have focused their attention on what is happening to prices in London. But housing is a number of different markets, which have regional variations and different interactions between the owner-occupier, private rented and social rented sectors.

Regional variations in house prices for similar sized properties reflect the imbalances of the economy: it is heavily reliant on financial services, which are concentrated in London, while the public sector makes up a significant share of many local economies – particularly in the North. Migration from across the UK to overcrowded and expensive areas – such as London and the South-East – have put property prices in those areas even further out of reach for would-be buyers.

To make matters worse, both Labour and Conservative governments have routinely failed to build enough houses. While the current government’s aim to build 300,000 new properties a year by 2020 is welcome, it is simply not enough to meet the backlog in demand – let alone address the fundamental affordability problem.

Where homes are being built, they’re often the wrong types of homes, in the wrong places. Family homes are being built, despite there being some 4m under-occupied such properties across the country.

Not that long ago, government was reducing the housing stock in many parts of the North, through the disastrous Housing Market Renewal programme. Houses are currently being sold in smaller cities such as Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent for just £1. And none of the government’s actions suggest that ministers understand these issues, or are prepared to address them.

House price inflation – and the awful affect it is having on home ownership rates for young people – is part of a wider problem of the global asset bubble. This bubble has seen huge increases in the price of assets – stocks, housing, bonds – in high income countries such as the UK. Successive governments have helped to fuel this through quantitative easing, ultra-cheap money and successive raids on pension funds.

What’s needed to address this asset bubble is a substantive increase in interest rates. But while this may slow the growth in house prices, the sad truth is it will do nothing to make housing more affordable for most young people.

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